Saving Fish from Drowning - Heal Burma

AMY TAN
a common nuisance, like flies and dust.” The day Sweet Ma said this,
she was wearing my mother’s hairpin, the one she said was so ugly. I
wanted to pull it out. And because I could not, I said in my strongest
voice that I had already chosen Bibi as my school name and I would
not change it. Sweet Ma then said if I was old enough to choose my
name, I was old enough to know the true circumstances of my tiny
mother’s death.
“She died of excess and dissatisfaction,” Sweet Ma divulged. “Too
much but never enough. She knew I was your father’s first wife, the
most respected, the most favored. No matter how many sons she
had, he would probably one day turn her out the door and replace
her with another.”
“Father said that?”
Sweet Ma did not confirm or deny. Instead she said, “You see, re­
spect is lasting. Fondness is passing, a whim for a season or two, only
to be replaced by a new fancy. All men do this. Your mother knew
this, I knew this. Someday you will, too. But rather than accept her
situation in life, your mother lost all control of her senses. She began
to crave sweets. She couldn’t stop eating them. And she was thirsty
all the time, drinking like the genie who swallowed the ocean and
spit it back up. One day, a ghost saw how weak she was in spirit and
entered her body through the hole in her stomach. Your mother fell
to the ground, twitching and babbling, and then she was still.”
In my made-up memory, I saw my tiny mother rise from her bed
and go over to a pot of sugared black sesame seed soup. She dipped
her fingers to taste if it was sweet enough. It was not. She added more
lumps of sugar, more, more, more. Then she stirred the hot, dark
paste, tipped bowlful after bowlful into her mouth, filling her stom­
ach to the level of her throat, the hollow of her mouth, until she fell
to the floor, wet and drowned.
When I developed diabetes, just five years ago, I thought my
mother might have died of the same thing, that her blood was either
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